General Description - Realtek RTL8188CE User Manual

RTL8188CE, RTL8188CEAU
User's Manual

1. General Description

The Realtek RTL8188CE, RTL8188CEAU is a highly integrated single-chip Wireless LAN (WLAN)
controller compatible with the IEEE 802.11n specification. It combines a MAC, a 1T1R capable baseband,
and RF in a single chip. The RTL8188CE, RTL8188CEAU provides a complete solution for a
high-performance wireless client.
The RTL8188CE, RTL8188CEAU baseband implements Multiple Input, Multiple Output (MIMO)
Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) with one transmit and one receive path (1T1R).
Features include one spatial stream transmission, short Guard Interval (GI) of 400ns, spatial spreading, and
support for both 20MHz and 40MHz channel bandwidth.
For legacy compatibility, Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum (DSSS), Complementary Code Keying (CCK)
and OFDM baseband processing are included to support all IEEE 802.11b, and 802.11g data rates.
Differential phase shift keying modulation schemes, DBPSK and DQPSK with data scrambling capability are
available, and CCK provides support for legacy data rates, with long or short preamble. The high speed
FFT/IFFT paths, combined with BPSK, QPSK, 16QAM, and 64QAM modulation of the individual
subcarriers, and rate compatible punctured convolutional coding with coding rate of 1/2, 2/3, 3/4, and 5/6,
provide higher data rates of 54Mbps and 150Mbps for IEEE 802.11g and 802.11n OFDM respectively.
The RTL8188CE, RTL8188CEAU builds in an enhanced signal detector, an adaptive frequency domain
equalizer, and a soft-decision Viterbi decoder to alleviate severe multi-path effects and mutual interference in
the reception of multiple streams. Robust interference detection and suppression are provided to protect
against Bluetooth, cordless phone, and microwave oven interference.
Efficient IQ-imbalance, DC offset, phase noise, frequency offset, and timing offset compensations are
provided for the radio frequency front-end. Selectable digital transmit and receive FIR filters are provided to
meet transmit spectrum mask requirements and to reject adjacent channel interference, respectively.
The RTL8188CE, RTL8188CEAU supports fast receiver Automatic Gain Control (AGC) with synchronous
and asynchronous control loops among antennas, antenna diversity functions, and adaptive transmit power
control functions to obtain better performance in the analog portions of the transceiver.
The RTL8188CE, RTL8188CEAU MAC supports 802.11e for multimedia applications, 802.11i for security,
and 802.11n for enhanced MAC protocol efficiency. Using packet aggregation techniques such as A-MPDU
with BA and A-MSDU, protocol efficiency is significantly improved. Power saving mechanisms such as
U-APSD, and APSD, reduces power wasted during idle time, and compensates for the extra power required
to transmit OFDM. The RTL8188CE, RTL8188CEAU provides simple legacy and 20MHz/40MHz
co-existence mechanisms to ensure backward and network compatibility.
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